Josien Kapma and I have been doggedly working in and around CPsquare on the question of how to put pockets and legs on small online communities for at least a year. By legs, we mean helping communities get places (usually requiring the expenditure of effort and or money). By pockets, we mean helping communities have stashes of money. A Facebook example follows. We’ve got a session accepted for the AoIR conference in Copenhagen. We’ve mostly tried to look at existing communities but recently thought we might learn more if we took a design fantasy approach.

Jean Lave’s ideas about how families manage their money have been very provoking for me because they help me get my head away from an accounting view and into a more informal and intuitive view. In Cognition in Practice, she talks about how families have many different “stashes” of money with negotiated, collectively understood rules for moving money between the stashes. Expenditures of a certain sort are made from one stash and not the other. This is like fund accounting in higher education. So a dollar is not a dollar: it’s value and meaning and usability depends on which stash it’s kept in. Universities, for example, can be in dire financial straits in one fund and be quite wealthy in another fund. Funds can borrow from one another, but they have to pay it back. This diagram suggests what some of the stashes and money flows in a complex family look like:

So to develop a Facebook example. What if there were a little “Facebook app” that were tied to a group (not an individual, where most of them are now). Imagine a group that would form around Bronwyn Stuckey’s “Community Capers” project. It has a Facebook Group (it’s so easy to join) and a blog (it’s so easy to follow) and a calendar (it’s so easy to add it to your own calendar so events show up). Why not a bank account and a little money management system? Here are some things it might do:

Gather donations from guests, members or participants. (Might want to put limits on amounts of money, so it stays informal.)

Provide a way to send gifts (gift certificates) to speakers or others who make a significant contribution (like send a specific book to everyone who contributes to an event). (Might want to limit payments so they go through Paypal.)

8 Responses to “Pockets and legs on Facebook groups”

Technically speaking I think this is easy using fundraising widgets like beth Kanter has been using. On the other hand, as a participant you might like equal contributions (like currently in CPsquare) and you might want to know what the money is used for, and how decisions are being made. So that would call for some governance structure I think.

[…] Trying to think of what would be needed, one thing might be collective money management tools. A tool to make international online banking “visible” to a larger community, in order for the community leaders to move money in an accountable way. It should be simple, but not too simple; communities probably want to differentiate several “stashes” of money. Read John’s blogpost about it here. […]

[…] Trying to think of what would be needed to get legs and pockets, one thing might be collective money management tools. A tool to make international online banking “visible” to a larger community, in order for the community leaders to move money in an accountable way. It should be simple, but not too simple; communities probably want to differentiate several “stashes” of money. Read John’s blogpost about it here. […]

right joitske, I think it is a bit more than just transferring money. In my view, it is like online, international banking (receiving /and/ spending money) MADE VISIBLE in near real time to a wider community. This way leaders would be made accountable to the community in a transparent way, but also would be given the mandate by the community to go ahead.

Facebook groups are just to make a practical example. It could be a stand-alone app, to make it usable also for google, yahoo or whatever groups.